Chapter Two
Eliot
Captain Parker Elmore walks to the ancient Chevy, respirator dangling from one hand, hips swaying in a way I shouldn’t be noticing.
Her blond hair’s pulled back, a few strands escaping her braid from the heat.
Star clipped to that Ranger double belt, sidearm on her hip, safety glasses pushed up on top of her head.
She just lied to my face.
Her blue eyes were clear when I called out her bullshit excuse. She didn’t look away. Just doubled down on the lie and kept moving.
She was steady on her feet. Controlled. Too controlled—shoulders tight, jaw set, but there was a slight tremor to her fingers when we shook hands.
Something in that building rattled her.
Moving to the passenger side of the Impala, she pulls a metal water bottle from inside the car and lifts it to her lips. I don’t want to stare, so I flash my credentials at the sheriff’s deputy, duck under the worst excuse for perimeter tape I’ve ever seen, and pull on my respirator.
The V-shaped patterns on the lobby walls point toward the baseboards.
Fire rises. When the pattern inverts like this, it means the origin’s somewhere at floor level.
Given the level of damage here compared to the rest of the building, I ain’t close to it yet, though.
I take photos from three different angles, and move on.
Offices branch off the hall to the left and right. Smoke stains cover the upper walls and ceilings, but no structural damage in this section. The fire moved through quickly, but never took hold.
At the end of the hall, there’s a large, open space that might have been an atrium at one point. I’ll need to pull blueprints when I get back to the office. Or see if the Rangers already have them.
Fuckin’ hell.
Half the second floor came down. Steel beams twist around concrete chunks. Shredded and water-logged drywall is everywhere.
I stop at the edge of a huge pile of debris. A support beam is bent at an angle steel shouldn’t take unless it burned over a thousand degrees for way too long.
The collapse happened in sections. I can see it in the layering. The steel gave first. Then everything above it.
A bead of sweat rolls down my spine.
“Stairwell’s partially blocked. Metal’s groanin’ like a sombitch. Need another minut—”
The building roars. Zack’s voice cuts out over the radio.
Felton’s voice is in my ear. “Eliot. The south side’s gone.”
I couldn’t get to him. Couldn’t even get myself out from under that metal grating.
I force my feet to move. To yield to my penance. I failed Zack, and becoming an arson investigator was the only way I could live with my guilt. I won’t fail anyone else. I can’t. The work won’t bring him back, but it’s all I’ve got.
The charring beneath the debris is uneven. Darker near the east wall, lighter toward the center. Could be a pour pattern—liquid accelerant pooling before it burned—or it could just be where the room got hottest once everything in it was burning at once. I won’t know until the lab runs the samples.
I crouch, ignoring the now-familiar pop in my left knee and the tightness of the skin pulling over my lower back and hip, and skim my gloved hand along the edge of the residue. It’s oily. Dropping a yellow evidence collection flag, I get to my feet and move on.
Boots crunch through the debris on the far side of the atrium. A man emerges from another hallway, camera in hand. He’s taller than me. Tanned skin, moving like someone who’s spent time in buildings worse than this one. It’s a detachment I recognize all too well.
“You’re the fire marshal?” he asks.
“Eliot Flint.”
The man’s dark eyes flicker and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Flint? Someone set you up for success early.”
I don’t respond. It’s one of the better jokes I’ve heard.
“Nate Hardison.” He doesn’t offer his hand, which I appreciate. The gesture feels pointless in a place like this. “This is your scene. We’re just here for documentation.”
“Appreciate it.” I pull out my own camera, start shooting the charring patterns on the exposed floor. “You’ve been through the whole building?”
“Most of it,” he says. “The east side’s unstable. I wouldn’t go more than ten feet down that hall I came from.”
I nod. “Origin’s somewhere in this mess. Multiple burn patterns. Signs of accelerant.”
Hardison’s quiet for a moment, staring at the debris. “Guard’s body was in here. ME took him early this morning.”
“I got the low-down from the deputy who called it in.” Moving to the east wall, I snap another few photos of the V patterns running up toward where the second floor used to be. “Someone wanted this building to burn. Question is whether they knew anyone was inside.”
Another set of footsteps from the lobby.
Lighter. Controlled. Elmore. She’s put the respirator back on, hard hat secure, safety glasses firmly in place.
Pausing at the edge of the debris field, she glances down at a door upended on a pile of rubble, then over at me.
Her gaze is guarded, and her shoulders tense when she locks eyes with her partner.
“You good?” Hardison asks.
The glare she shoots him could ignite this place all over again. “What’ve we got?” She turns slightly, directing the question to me.
“Looks like multiple points of origin. Accelerant in at least three spots, maybe more.” I crouch near the base of the debris pile, angling for a photo of the charring on an exposed floor joist. The wood’s burned deeper on one side than the other—I see that a lot when liquid pools before ignition.
“I’ll come back with sample cans after I finish the walk-through.
They’re vapor locked, so they work better than evidence bags for shit like this. ”
Parker moves closer, peering at the area I’m photographing. “The building’s owned by a commercial real estate LLC. We’ll run it down. Make sure they don’t have any reason to want it…gone.”
“Good. I'll have preliminary findings by Monday. Full lab results take a couple more days.”
She's quiet for a second. “Multiple points of origin—how do you know?”
I point to two other spots across the room where the charring’s darker, more concentrated.
“Burn patterns. Every accelerant has a signature, and it sits there—soaks into anything porous—before it ignites. Different from natural fire spread. This”—I tap the wood near where I was photographing—“burned deeper on one side. Whatever was used sat there for a bit before it caught.”
She follows where I’m pointing, and I can see her connecting the dots. “So someone walked through here, poured accelerant in more than one spot, and then struck a match on their way out.”
“Match, cigarette, det cord, spark from a cell phone… But yeah. That’s the gist of it. The lab will confirm.” My left knee pops again when I twist to capture the burn patterns from another angle. I ignore the brief flash of pain.
“How long does it take? From pour to ignition? How long would the unsub have been in the building?”
“Depends on the accelerant and the ignition method. Could have been seconds. Could have been minutes. Hell, even an hour.”
She’s processing that, and I’m trying not to notice the way her jaw tightens when she's thinking. Or that this close, the scent of her shampoo tempers the harshness of the air around us.
“You always this thorough?” she asks.
“Yup. Been an investigator for five years now. Before that, I was a firefighter.” I straighten, camera still in hand. “You learn pretty fast that the details matter.”
She holds my gaze for a brief moment. “Good to know.”
Something shifts in the air between us. An acknowledgement that we’re both here to do the same job, just from different angles.
“I should let you finish your walk-through,” she says.
“Okay.” We stare at one another for too long before she turns and strides over to her partner, who’s photographing the north wall.
Except I can still feel where she was standing. Like the space she occupied has a different temperature than the rest of the room.
Well, shit.
I force myself to look back at the charring pattern, the way the wood grain’s exposed where the heat was most intense. This is what I’m here for. Not the blond-haired, blue-eyed Ranger with something broken underneath all that control.
I take three more photos, adjust the angle, take another two.
Professional. Methodical. Then move to the next origin point, crouch down, and lift the camera again.
There’s accelerant residue to collect, burn patterns to document, a timeline to reconstruct.
A man died here. And I’m going to make sure whoever’s responsible pays for that crime.
I’m halfway through photographing the third origin point when I catch myself glancing back at Captain Elmore.
Focus, Flint. And get to work.